F1 2012 Singapore Qualifying Summary

How did the drivers compare within a team in each sector (comparing sector best times for each driver captured across all three qualifying sessions)? A greeny-blue bar to the left shows "driver1" in a team got a better time than "driver 2". A reddy-orange bar to the right shows "driver 2" did better:

This chart helps us see how the drivers compared to their team mate, but it doesn't really tell us anything about overall competitiveness?

If we rank by final classification, how do laptimes across qualifying sessions compare, and how do they compare to the ultimate laptime for each driver (the sum of their fastest sector times)? It seems that if VET had driven an ultimate lap, he might have made second?

(Note to self - increase label sizes!) This is a much more informative chart, I think: the ultimate laptimes might be revealing, and we can also get a feel for how things improved session on session (though why they might have improved is another matter?)

Another intra-team comparison chart - the view over all the panels gives us some idea of the competitiveness of each team. I wonder whether adding lines at y=10.5 and y=17.5 to show cut off for each session would be useful?

The session times (and ultimate lap times) for each driver in "standard" driver order - this is a little confusing, I think, in terms of making sense of the whole, but is an easier chart to navigate if you are used to looking for drivers by car number?

The next chart uses bars to show the delta between each driver's session time and the overal fastest time in the session. We lose information about which driver was fastest in the session - I maybe need to add a marker to show this driver?

Looking at session times is one thing, but it can be more useful to try to see where performance differed in terms of sector times. The following shows the deltas between fastest recorded sector time and each driver's personal sector time. I have ordered the drivers by driver number:

One issue with this is that we occlude markers, eg in the case of HAM. This might be addressed by using different shaped markers (eg empty circle, square and triangle) or layered, differently sized markers...

The following stacked bar chart makes it easy to see how the overall performance differences per driver by sector compared to the fastest time recorded in each sector:

The ordering by driver helps us find driver's by car number.

An alternative ordering shows the stacked bars by final classification. There's something odd going on here - MAS and RAI are inverted and the classification order is different to the classification ordered ultimate laptimes chart above? Bah..... I was going to say this is a really handy chart, because it lets us compare sector times (ish) between drivers next to each other in classification terms. But with the inversion in ordering, I can't trust what data is there:-( Ho hum... back to the scripts... I guess this suggests I should really do incremental commentary as I produce each chart so I can check they are all consistent as I go along... [SPOTTED IT... I'm using the wrong ranking... Will fix .....] - DONE.

This chart is handy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it lets us compare sector times (ish) between drivers next to each other in classification terms; secondly, where columns appear inverted (eg as in case of MAL and VET), it shows us that VET, in this case, had an ultimate laptime that would have bumped him up the order, if he could have driven to it...

The following chart allows us to see the time distance between drivers per sector compared to their ranking within that sector:

This provides an alternative view on the deltas from best sector time for each driver, as ordered by driver number:

This chart goes back to the session (rather than sector) comparisons - it attempts to show the delta for each driver between each session best time and their ultimate laptime:

And finally, a view over the sector times, normalised according to the fastest sector time recorded:

Again, this chart suffers from occlusion of points, as for example in the case of HAM.